The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 9, 2024, episode of The Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
A big looming question in the presidential race is this: Will Republican and independent voters who backed Nikki Haley in the GOP primaries support Donald Trump and the numbers he needs to prevail? This week, new data suggested that the answer to this may be ‘No’. The Bulwark reports that a new poll taken by a Democratic-leaning firm finds that a surprisingly large percentage of voters who backed Haley say they will defect to Kamala Harris. A New York Times national poll finds her making new inroads among GOP voters. How real is all this? Today, we’re talking to The Bulwark’s Marc Caputo, one of the reporters who broke the news of the first survey. He’s well-sourced among Republicans and he’s going to tell us what’s really going on with them on this question. Great to have you back on, Marc.
Marc Caputo: Pleasure to have you, Greg. I appreciate you.
Sargent: Marc, you and The Bulwark’s Sam Stein reported that a new poll from the Dem-leaning firm Blueprint found that Trump is supported by just 45 percent of Republican and GOP-leaning independent voters who backed Haley in the primaries. Thirty-six percent of those voters are backing Harris. Are these numbers plausible, do you think? And if so, why are they plausible?
Caputo: Yeah, I think they’re plausible. Don’t get me wrong. One of my weaknesses is that I generally believe polls, but I believe polls for what they are. I don’t think Blueprint made up the numbers, right? They’re real. For this cohort of voters, there’s a problematic sign here, especially when you compare it to how they say they had voted in 2020. In 2020, this same group of voters said that they backed Trump over Biden by 31 percentage points. Compared to today, he’s lost 22 percentage points of support from this group of voters. And if you saw the way in which he ran his campaign, he ran a much more of an outsider, 2016-style campaign, so to speak, a less establishment Republican campaign. So in that respect, the numbers do make sense to me.
Sargent: I want to clarify that people shouldn’t take a single poll as gospel, but we also had the top-quality New York Times/Sienna poll this week, which found Harris leading among likely voters overall by 49 to 46. It also found that Trump has 89 percent of Republicans while Harris has 96 percent of Democrats. Harris gets nine percent of Republicans, which is up from last month’s New York Times poll. I think it’s worth taking this idea seriously that Trump’s support is a bit soft among Republicans. Marc, what are Republicans out there, GOP strategists, saying? Are they worried about this?
Caputo: No. That’s one of the jarring things for me as a reporter to balance. They insist, and some of these are people I trust ... It’s not to say that they’re wrong or they’re lying or whatever, but they think things look pretty good for Trump. Their own polling, they say, and in some cases they’ll show off-the-record, indicates things are a little better for him. For instance, like the Quinnipiac Swing State Polls today for the Rust Belt indicate that that’s the case. We just don’t know. Outside of the polling, they’re looking at things like what The Washington Times, I believe, had reported about Republicans closing the gap in voter registration in places like Pennsylvania. There are all these little data points. Their absentee ballot and early vote returns, Republicans are better than they were in 2020 in places like Pennsylvania. So these are the hopes they have. Now, whether this is a 2022-style Republican overestimation of their abilities relative to their performance, obviously we’re going to [see] on Election Day, but their feeling that they’re communicating amongst themselves to their candidates is pretty good. I’m not saying they’re right, I’m not saying they’re wrong; but there are times where the public polling and their private sentiment align, and there are times when it doesn’t. Here’s one of those times when it just doesn’t.
Sargent: It’s interesting because I’m hearing from some Democrats that they’re pretty damn happy with some of these voter registration numbers.
Caputo: Both campaigns are acting like they’re winning.
Sargent: That is very true.
Caputo: Incidentally, a week and a half ago, there was a much broader conversion of Republican despondents at Trump’s chances, and is almost flip switched four days ago.
Sargent: A week and half ago, you just told us, Republicans were despondent. Why?
Caputo: Their polling didn’t look so good and their data didn’t look so good. And now they think it looks better, or now they say it.
Sargent: Yeah, that’s very interesting. I want to go back to what you guys reported. There’s this pool of around 10 percent of Republican and GOP-leaning independent voters who backed Haley, and Dems think that if Harris can get even only a third of those voters, it could make a big difference. Those wouldn’t be big numbers of voters, but, on the margins, that’s going to matter. You think those are reasonable calculations?
Caputo: Oh yeah. One of the things [is] that: whether Harris’s campaign, which is the remnants of the Biden campaign, or the recoupled Biden campaign, regardless of how they perform, their data is pretty sophisticated and advanced, especially some of their digital media buying. But that’s a totally separate story. The main thing to remember with all of these swing states (I live in what used to be a swing state): the stuff is decided at the margins. One thing to remember is that the gender gap is still huge, and it’s lopsided. Women are backing Harris by disproportionately larger numbers than men are backing Trump. The Trump campaign, to partly compensate for this, is trying to remake the electorate by getting more men, especially ages like 18 to 40, out to vote. The likely path for a Donald Trump–win hinges on turning out unlikely voters. And the question is, who would you rather be in that situation, right? If you’re an Occam’s razor person...
Sargent: Well, Marc, what you’re implying is that the gamble that Republicans are making is a bit more tenuous than the one that the Harris campaign is making. The story of this race all along has been that—Trump, when he led Biden, and Trump now, when he’s more or less tied, maybe a little behind Harris—a significant chunk of his support is coming from these low propensity voters, as well as nonwhite and young voters who have drifted from Democrats. Democrats I talked to think that’s inherently soft support. What do you think of that?
Caputo: It is almost by definition. These are low propensity voters because they’re not reliable voters.
Sargent: Right.
Caputo: But—and not to quibble with your verb gamble; this is the gamble they’re taking—I’m not sure Donald Trump has much of a choice. In fact, the only thing is campaign is doing differently now, which I wrote about in our Monday MAGAville newsletter at The Bulwark, is the employing of RFK and Tulsi Gabbard on the campaign trail to appeal not obviously to your traditional Democrats but some of these more disaffected voters who were in the Democratic Party. There might be some Bernie Sanders remnants floating around there. That is one of the only times you’re seeing the Trump campaign message beyond a strict and pure Republican MAGA base.
It is notable that this is the path that Donald Trump is on. He partly chose it on his own for just being who he is, campaigning the way he does and speaking the way he does. This is the path and this is the way they’re choosing.
Sargent: I absolutely agree. The Trump campaign is betting huge on being able to really maximize turnout among men. There is some drift among nonwhite, younger men from Democrats. They’re trying to capitalize on that. The thing is, when they go down that road, when they do everything they can to maximize that turnout among male voters, the way they’re doing it actually risks alienating women further.
Caputo: It can, sure. That’s just the reality of campaigning or squeezing the balloon. You push it in one place and it deforms in another. But Trump’s path is very particular, and it’s unclear if they believe that Michigan or Pennsylvania are their best bets. This changes by the day. What’s interesting about Michigan, which is where I went to watch the Tulsi-RFK show, is that the demographics of that electorate might be a little more favorable for Trump in that he’s got these white union voters, and some of them culturally are more aligned with him. There is this hope in the Trump campaign that the significant number of Muslim American voters, to the degree that they care about Gaza and Israel policy, and to the degree that they think he’s not too much of a greater evil in their view on Middle East policy, that they’ll drift his way. Especially men when it comes to social issues, transgender issues specifically. Then you have his messaging to try to pick up more Black men. So that’s just a real state to watch for its interesting demographics and the way it’s playing out.
Sargent: Let’s talk a little bit more about who these voters are. You said that a lot of these Republican and independent voters who went for Haley are women. I think we’re talking about independent women, moderate GOP women in exurbs largely, and maybe in less liberal suburbs around places like Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Detroit, right? Can you talk about who these voters are? That’s who we’re talking about, right?
Caputo: That’s just it. And if you talk to Republican data guys who do focus groups, they will tell you that it’s particularly pronounced with some of these Republican women in these settings, where they try to go beyond the poll and dig into their belief system. The problem that Republican data guys, when they hold these focus groups with women, are encountering is the utter antipathy that they have for Donald Trump. One told me that, invariably, when you see these women being interviewed, a word that will always come up is either ‘disgusting’ or ‘pig’, or sometimes both, to describe Trump. Some of these people very closely align with or did vote for Nikki Haley, and that is a significant portion of this base of supporters we’re talking about. I would be remiss in not pointing out the Trump retort to this as like, Look, most of these voters are going to come home the more he campaigns “real Republicans.” And those who don’t, we’re going to be lost anyway. And he’ll make up for by adding new voters. To your point, they’re gamble and that’s what they’re doing.
Sargent: I’m not a political strategist, but I’m going to surmise that being called a ‘pig’ by a lot of voters probably isn’t a great thing for your ...
Caputo: Suboptimal.
Sargent: Yeah, suboptimal. What you just told us is that you talk to Republican data people who conduct focus groups and what they are encountering in their focus groups of independent women, moderate GOP women, like I said, in less liberal suburbs around some of these swing state cities, maybe ex-urban, they just hate Trump, right? That’s what you’re saying. This is the critical GOP leaning support that he’s at risk of losing, right?
Caputo: A hundred percent. I mean, he’s not risk of losing 100 percent of them, but yeah, you are 100 percent correct. This is what’s manifesting in this poll that we’re looking at. Now polls are snapshot in time and all of that, but it has some value and the question for the Trump campaign is: To what degree are they going to employ Nikki Haley on the campaign trail?
Sargent: Speaking of surrogates, I think this is the time to mention that Harris has a lot of Republican surrogates. You’ve got Liz Cheney campaigning for her, other high-profile Republicans. This is a really rare thing, the degree to which all these Republicans—including someone like Liz Cheney, who’s a very high-profile figure—have come out against their party’s nominee and explicitly endorse the opponent. I’ve got to think the sheer surprising nature of that is having some impact among these GOP voters, right? We know that voters take their cues from elites, and here elites are screaming very loudly. What do you think? That’s got to have an effect, right?
Caputo: You would think the real shocker is Dick Cheney. The idea that Dick Cheney would endorse a Democrat. Imagine coming back from 2004, you’d be like, What the fuck? Look, what is this?
Sargent: Speaking of which, where’s George W. Bush?
Caputo: I would really doubt a Bush would come out and say that sort of thing, but I guess major things have happened.
Sargent: Well, what do you make of all these surrogates? That’s got to have an impact just by the sheer rare quality of it, right?
Caputo: Yeah. The Harris campaign has been very clear about their intentions of using these Republican surrogates—these former Trump appointees and his running mate, former vice president, the former secretary of defense, the former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump—using all of them as part of a broad narrative in a campaign to frame or portray or show or whatever the verb is: Donald Trump is unfit to lead. For instance, after the last week (I think it was the last week, I lost track of time), the debate with Vance and Walz, the Harris campaign rather triumphantly pointed out that Walz had courted Vance and scored quite a moment when Vance had just ducked the question of the 2020 election denialism, who won in 2020. The Harris campaign put out a digital ad about that in order to advance the narrative of like, Look, this guy is sticking with him because he can’t get his other guy, former Vice President Pence, to stick with him. He’s unfit to serve. This is their constant messaging that they’re just going to drill and drive home. And that’s where these Republican surrogates—Dick Cheney included and Liz Cheney included—come in.
Sargent: And that is having an impact, you think?
Caputo: I think it is. I think we’re at a time of great disaggregation and unraveling and shaking-up, where traditional lines are blurring and breaking, and coalitions are forming and reforming. We have seen this increasing trend of more highly educated and college-educated people moving Democrat-ward or blue-ward or leftward, if you will, and the others moving more right. In that respect, that makes sense. But, as you said, this is going to be decided at the margins. It’s your swing states. So will it make a difference? Yes. Will everything make a difference? Yes.
Sargent: Let’s talk about another reason why these voters might be alienated by Trump. In the MAGA mythology, any GOP-leaning independents and Republicans who might be swayed by the likes of Liz Cheney into supporting Harris must be neocon warmongers. They must hate Trump because they’re country club– or corporate boardroom–Republicans who don’t like Trump because he’s supposedly a populist, supposedly wants to help American workers, all that bullshit, all that MAGA baloney. My guess is that these voters probably don’t like what Trump actually has done: fomented violent insurrection, side with dictators like Vladimir Putin, get convicted of a whole bunch of crimes, sexual assault, and just degrading public life in every way that you can think of. This is unprecedented stuff, just like the parade of Republicans endorsing Harris is unprecedented. I just keep coming back to this thought, How could the unprecedented nature of this not have an impact? There is a pool of Republican voters out there who genuinely hates those things that I just listed, right?
Caputo: Well, yeah, and they’re shifting toward Harris’s camp. Harris has done a good job, politically speaking, of not appearing too far “to the left.” She goes on The View. She’s like, I get the difference between me and Biden, once she had the second chance to answer the question, I’m going to have a Republican in my cabinet. [She’s] reaching out and showing she stands like this. Part of the Trump calculus with having to rely on these less reliable, low propensity voters is a lot of those low propensity voters don’t vote, I believe, because they are disaffected and they don’t believe in the system. They don’t think it’s going to work. This is the path left for Trump. And if the establishment, so to speak, is fleeing him, he just needs to find more voters who think the establishment has failed them and to persuade them that it has. Trump’s very good at using attacks against him and weapons against him as his own weapon, sort of jujitsu-ing this stuff. We’re going to find out on November 5 how successful he’s going to be with that, because in the end, a lot of elections in swing states are decided by two things. You turn out your base, and you got a little bit in the middle. That is easier for Harris in the respect that she is following a much more traditional path of doing that. He needs to reinvent what that middle looks like.
Sargent: What does your gut tell you in the end? Is this Republican defection a serious thing? Is it a serious threat to Trump’s chances?
Caputo: Oh yeah, but it’s just the nature of ... The election is so close. If you’re trying to win an election, what you want to do is to turn on voters and not turn off voters. Trump has had a tendency to turn off voters. Now, one of the odd things that’s difficult about covering Trump is disreality, which is there are some voters who are turned on by stuff that turn off other voters. But I don’t think any of us knows the degree to which that’s going to actually benefit Donald Trump. In the end, as important as this poll about Nikki Haley voters is the cross tabs that you referenced in those other surveys that show, generally speaking, Kamala Harris, more often than not and more polls than not, is pulling marginally more Republican support to her cause than Donald Trump is pulling Democratic support to his cause. That could be the ballgame.
Sargent: Agreed. Marc Caputo, thank you so much for coming on with us. Fascinating stuff.
Caputo: Thanks, Greg. I appreciate you.
Sargent: Everybody make sure to check out some new content we have up at tnr.com: Kate Aronoff arguing for the politicization of hurricanes, and Ben Jacobs on the senate race that Democrats absolutely, totally, utterly have to win. And check out the latest episode of Deep State Radio as Kori Schake, Rosa Brooks, and Ed Luce join David Rothkopf to discuss the grave consequences of disinformation for the election in November and beyond. We’ll see you all tomorrow.
You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.